Solar EV charging
Charge the car off your roof.
An electric vehicle can add more consumption than everything else in the house put together. Charged from the grid, it moves your bill up a slab. Charged from your own generation in daylight, it is close to free running.
The arithmetic of solar miles.
A typical Indian EV uses in the region of 15 kWh per 100 km. A 3 kW array in Kerala generates on the order of 12 kWh on a good day, averaging out to about 1,460 kWh per kW across the year. For everyday commuting distances, a modest rooftop array covers a meaningful share of the driving.
The catch is timing. Solar generates in daylight and most people charge overnight. Charging while the sun is up draws straight from the roof at the full value of self-consumption; charging after dark pulls from the grid unless you have storage to shift it.
Size for the car before you install.
Adding an EV to an existing system is the expensive order of operations. The limit is usually the inverter's capacity and your sanctioned load rather than free roof area, and both are cheaper to specify once than to revisit.
If a vehicle is anywhere in your plans — this year or in three — say so at the survey. We will size the inverter with headroom and tell you what it does to the quote, which is usually less than the cost of replacing it later.
What you actually need on the wall.
For a home, an AC wall box is almost always the right answer. It works with the charger built into the vehicle, installs on a normal domestic supply, and costs a fraction of anything faster. DC fast charging is a commercial proposition: the equipment and the supply upgrade both cost far more than home charging can justify.
The installation question that matters is load management — whether the house can charge a car and run everything else without tripping. That is part of what we assess before quoting, and it is a design question rather than a product one.
Workplace and commercial charging.
Commercial solar and EV charging fit together unusually well. Vehicles sit parked through the working day, which is precisely when a commercial array is producing. That converts a car park into daytime load for generation that would otherwise be exported at the lower banked rate — improving the economics of both.
For a business already considering rooftop solar, adding charge points is often a better use of surplus generation than exporting it.
